ON PURPOSE (2025-present)
lifelong durational performance
started in response to increasing censorship
lifelong durational performance
started in response to increasing censorship
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"Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious lifeblood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life...We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of publick men, how we spill that season'd life of man preserv'd and stor'd up in Books..." --John Milton, Areopagitica; A SPEECH OF Mr. JOHN MILTON For the Liberty of UNLICENC'D PRINTING, To the PARLAMENT of ENGLAND (1644) |
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Documentation from 3.19.25 (left), 7.22.25 (center), and 3.30.26 (right)
British poet John Milton defied State censorship by illegally publishing and distributing a "speech" against the British Parliament. This act violated the Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing from 1643, which stated that authors needed a license in advance of publishing a text and could be imprisoned (alongside printers and publishers) for writing considered problematic by the State. Additionally, the order gave the government the ability to seize and destroy unlicensed books. Milton's argument against censorship has been cited four times by the US Supreme Court in cases pertaining to free speech, and a section of the quotation above is inscribed above the entrance of the New York Public Library's Rose Reading Room.
For my performance On Purpose, I had a quotation from Milton's pamphlet tattooed on my body. The chosen font is unfit for this purpose; the letters are bleeding, affecting legibility. When a word becomes too difficult to read, I ask tattoo artist Laura Hopperdietzel to edit the tattoo using a new and more enduring font. The first word to become illegible was, poignantly, "life" (x2).
On Purpose uses chance elements and a hopefully lengthy duration to remind me of the living labour involved in resisting State power. It also invites a consideration of the weird material relation between writing, life, and the nature of the [White male] human that emerges, bloody but preserved, in Milton's text. Whose body--or what kind of body--is embalmed in the writing and distribution of publick speech? What is the nature of this life that transcends life?